Sit on Famous Outlaw Laps
Fort Worth, Texas
Butch Cassidy, The Sundance Kid, and three of their "Wild Bunch" gang members posed for one of the Old West's most famous photos on November 21, 1900. Wearing stylish new suits and bowler hats, the gang was flush with cash from several successful bank and train robberies, and had traveled to Fort Worth to unwind in its "Hell's Half Acre" district of saloons and brothels.
Photographer John Swartz snapped the five outlaws in a studio portrait, and liked it so much that he displayed a copy in his lobby -- where it was seen by Fort Worth's chief detective. The detective copied the photo onto Wanted posters, and the Wild Bunch gang was forced to split up, never to rob together again. All five men eventually died violently.
A life-size bronze replica of the "Fort Worth Five Photograph" was commissioned by Fort Worth neurosurgeon George Cravens, who owns the building where the sculpture has been nestled into an outdoor niche. He originally wanted to display it in a nearby park, but he liked the finished piece by Franco Alessandrini so much that he decided to shelter it from the weather.
The artwork, completed in December 2017, stands only four blocks from where the photo had been snapped 117 years before. Cravens told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "I know I'll catch hell over it," although the people we spoke with in the local tourism office seemed perfectly happy with Cravens' acknowledgment of the city's Wild West past.
The sculpture is designed so that visitors can pose in the outlaws' laps. Butch Cassidy sits far right, The Sundance Kid far left.